Well, here's an update I hadn't expected to come up with in a night, not after I lost all of my notes for this when one of my old laptops broke down and had to rework on getting this chapter out.
Honestly, my writing style should have changed quite a bit in the last few years and might not mesh too well with the older chapters of the fic anymore but that's that, I suppose.
Also, please note that I am using old lore for this fic - as I don't quite like the direction they've been taking the lore except in a few cases.
Enjoy the read!
-Toph the Trickster
Sweet Corruption:
Duress
"Don't worry. I'm not going to deprive you of all your secrets. Just your most precious one."
~TtT~
"We decide who is worthy of our works."
That was the very first lesson he remembers his teacher giving him. At the time he had been a street rat, scavenging his way from day to day on the dirty and waste-filled streets of Zaun. It was here that he was taught one of the most important lessons of his life: that only through utilizing every resource at his disposal would he be able to survive.
Crushing all the competition could follow after that - and even then still used the same principles.
He was an orphan, a child abandoned on steps of an orphanage that went under within three years, and left him to fend for himself. Of course, a young boy had few options allowed to him as someone in Zaun with no money and no ability, so he had to improvise. He learned the streets, every turn, every bend, every dark and narrow hallway. He checked for entrances where only creatures of his size could enter and ways to climb up buildings and move from rooftop to rooftop.
That art of movement was the first thing he learned.
For food, he scavenged, taking what he could from what people threw out. When he had mastered his ability to move about the city, he began to steal so he could get something fresher and healthier. Occasionally he would run into one of the other children he had been with in the orphanage and he would give them some of what he had, but that happened less and less frequently as the years went by. An optimistic side of him wanted to believe that they were making their way out of the hell that they had to live in.
The realist in him could imagine what might have happened to them, however.
It was an open secret what went on in Zaun, what grim and evil works happened there.
And so it was when he was caught snooping in an alchemist's workshop because his curiosity got the better of him that he realized that he was probably about to join them.
He fought, however. The child fought to get out of the old man's grasp and run to the door. The inside of the building was unfamiliar but his ability to identify and create routes on the fly had developed enough that he had a good chance of making it out before the alchemist could do whatever it was he had planned with intruders.
He was almost out the window when he heard the question:
"Would you like to learn, boy?" The man's voice was old and raspy - like dust in the wind - but no less loud. "I've seen you look through the window every day. Do you want to make more of yourself than what you are now? Do you want to get out of the hellish sameness of life on the streets?"
His amber eyes eyed the blood-red of the alchemist. "Why?" he asked.
And for the first time he saw the old man smile, a haunting smile made all the more fearful by the two rows of sharpened teeth.
"I decided you were worthy of my work."
~TtT~
The first part of his apprenticeship was spent in Zaun proper, learning the most rudimentary of theories and ingredients while being taught the guiding principles of his master. He learned of the human body first and what happened when they were exposed to different materials.
Of course, this was done to neither the boy nor the master, so that only meant that they had to acquire humans for him to study.
This was usually done by approaching the prisons - though some days, they would pull out a street urchin or two and that made him especially uncomfortable, but he did not argue with his master. His master asked for those that were slated to die, those that had no one and nothing left in life. Sometimes he had to do this himself, and on certain days there were those that would deny him.
On days like that, he would send the officer a toothy grin that looked simply wrong coming from a boy his age.
"Change your mind, I'll change it for you." He would say, his voice dripping with something not even he could identify.
Part of him is thankful that he has never had to change their minds for them - yet.
He was taught to kill his heart, harden it when times came for him to do his grim work. On some level, he even started to take a form of satisfaction whenever something he was working on functioned as intended. When the creature would die quickly when that was what his mixture was meant to, or slowly waste away over hours and days like he wanted.
On days like that his master would pat him on the shoulder and say he was doing well.
It would be a few months more after that - more than a hundred subjects killed in various tests of his skill and growing understanding of the craft that his master packed shop and ordered him to come with him on a journey.
And what a journey it was going to be.
They travelled from Zaun, moving on foot or on horseback when they could find those that would ride with them past Piltover. It was the first time the boy had seen anything outside of the filthy cesspit that his hometown was, and it was strange to see anything that wasn't made of patchwork steel, rotting wood, and uneven stone. The lights and technology were fascinating, but he decided that he didn't particularly care for the way the law enforcement eyed as they were passing through.
Through the snow of Freljord they went afterwards, the way the bitter cold was against his skin a strange, new sensation that he was not familiar with. The different tribes in the area were not all too friendly either, and so they generally avoided them.
And when they couldn't… Well, he always appreciated someone knew to try his craft on, so that was acceptable, too.
They eventually made it to the shore and found themselves on a boat that was travelling northwest, to what he had come to hear was a place called the 'Shadow Isles.'
"There are aspects to our work that little are aware of - even other alchemists." His master told him. "Aspects that require us to explore something more than ingredients, more than ways to mix and apply them, but something far… older."
"Older, master?"
"The very land you stand on, the world around you." The old man continued as they leaned against the railing at the front of the ship. The dark clouds over the Shadow Isles in the distance with the wind blowing against them. "They shape the pieces of the puzzle, and most of all, they shape the board." Red met gold as the old man looked at him. "You will find that the intent behind our craft will shape you far more than your skill in the it will. For our work is shaped by our intent, and our desires. You will understand when you finally find what is worthy of your work, boy."
"Have you, master?"
The old man's laughter resounded through the windy twilight, like deserts sands blowing in the night.
"Yes, I am taking you to see it."
~TtT~
The Shadow Isles.
He couldn't quite describe it at first. It reminded him of Zaun in many ways but was somehow… purer.
Purer in intent.
Purer in form.
What that was, he didn't know.
Shadows creeped around while the the trees towered over them ominously. He could hear creatures in the undergrowth and beyond the shadows of the canopy but could see none, and none came to encounter them. There were no roads or pathways, and no source of light but the torches they carried.
Whispers came and went as they moved, telling him of death and doom and a coming horror that even the evils of the Isles feared to face.
It was in times like that when he felt a bitter cold that put the chill of Freljord to shame.
"Pay the ghosts no mind, boy." His master noticed his reactions. "They are weak and do not understand."
They continued their trek till they came upon a large ravine where the forest ended. Rocks came up in spikes on either side, lining the walls and towering over them as spires. Here the whispers ended, the sound of creatures ceased.
Here, there was no life, there was no death, all he felt was the cold.
His master beckoned him to follow as the man continued into the ravine without pause, the old man clearly unperturbed by their surroundings or the feelings they caused to well up in the boy. This was what inspired his master's work?
Either way, he would soon find out.
Steeling his heart, more so than he had ever had to do with all of the people he had killed in the last few years, the young man that was the young man followed his master into the darkness.
And there, he, too, found what was worthy of his work.
~TtT~
He was gone for a long time. Years, in fact, and he returned to the main continent alone and as a grown man. The journey had changed him in many ways that only truly manifested when he had come back to Zaun and taken his old master's workshop as his own, opening for business and taking clients once more.
Those that came in mostly came out of curiosity, having heard of the old shop that had closed down and had recently reopened. Those that came he sold his wares to: mixtures that sharpened the mind, mixtures that gave strength for a brief period of time.
And of course his specialty: his poisons.
They came and went, and as the success of his products became known across the city, more and more came for his expertise: those with enemies, those with fears. He greeted them all himself, displaying a charm that few had expected from an alchemist, and gave them what they asked for.
Some he didn't charge, many he did - some in gold and some in other things.
It was during this time that he had earned a title that many had grown to forget, but one he held unto dearly: the Professor.
He even found himself being taken under retainer with Noxus who wanted his skills applied in their latest campaign at Ionia. Out of curiosity and a desire to see some of his craft put to the test on a larger scale, he accepted, even deciding to take on an apprentice before he departed for the island to the east.
His apprentice was rather different from what he was like all those years ago. For one, this child was a descendant of a long and prestigious line of chemists, well known in their craft across Zaun. The boy's father had wanted the child to work under him, he who had no heirs, so that their family could adopt the work and perhaps continue his legacy should he have no true successor.
The now-master almost laughed at the thought. It would have worked if not for one thing:
The child had focused too much on improving his craft, on taking each and every opportunity to think up a better mix, a more potent toxin. It disappointed the master to know that all he would do was sell it to the highest bidder.
The boy focused too much on the 'how' and not the 'why.'
And even when he tried to tell his apprentice this, the child couldn't quite understand. He only saw - only wanted - the next opportunity to field his newest piece. He couldn't see beyond that, didn't want to. There was no cause for him, nothing worthy to work for or work towards besides bettering his craft. He didn't understand, and that was why he never truly taught his apprentice the last of his secrets, the ones that would have made them capable of single-handedly ending the Noxian-Ionian war without so much as having a single soldier step on the shoreline.
The boy didn't understand what it was to decide who was worthy of their work.
It did not bother him, though. The child was young and so was he. There would be other apprentices, and in time he would find a true successor, if not in the art, then the philosophy behind it.
That was what he kept telling himself until he decided he wanted to be on the warfront and see the results of his work himself.
Until he was changed.
The first night had been the strangest. Many of those that had been with him in the lab had fled at the sight of him, not wanting to see if he had kept his mind in the transformation.
It was good for them, for that first night he had not.
He ran through the woods of Ionia, the light of the full moon filtering through the tall woods and shining down on his hunched form as his tattered coat fluttered behind him. In the back of his mind he knew that the Noxians were searching for him now, wondering what had happened to their head chemist and what it could mean for them to lose him, but he ignored that.
There was a hunger in him that he had to sate now, one that he sated when he happened upon a small encampment of Ionian survivors that had managed to make it out of his death clouds alive that day.
In minutes, they were no longer survivors.
He felt something different then. Something very different from the satisfaction he felt when his work was rewarded. This… this pleasure gave him a very different kind of fulfillment and for the first time since he was changed, his senses returned to him.
That first night, after he had run out of the Noxian camp and killed twenty men, he found that he had become a strange creature of some kind. Not man, not beast, but something in between - something more.
Strength filled him, energy and power that made it so he had no need for rest. He could tear down men with ease and destroy objects with little difficulty. His senses sharpened so he could find even the faintest traces of blood and other such things when he focused on them - No one could hide from him.
The Noxian officials say he was cursed by a celestial that lead the Ionians on the warfront. Changed him to become a beast that complemented the ruthlessness in his heart.
In private he laughed at how much of a boon he was given and the fact that none realized that he could return to his human form at will.
He simply preferred to remain a beast. It was simply far too convenient.
The work continued, however, though his apprentice began to do much of it himself as the Professor began to favor participating in the field himself, instigating his very own bloodbath before the death clouds were even fielded with his howling marking his entry into the fray for all to hear.
Those smart enough fled.
Those foolish enough to stay and fight were cut down and torn apart.
It was glorious.
And in the waning years of the war, he chose to remain in Ionia to slake his thirst on those foolish enough to come near Noxian lines while he was out on evening… strolls.
It was on one of these strolls of his that he encountered something very interesting.
The small caught his attention first. It wasn't blood, for that was common at the border. No, it was something else. Something the Professor was rather familiar with, but didn't encounter all too often since his new condition. It was also rather uncommon to find on the battlefield at all.
This amused him.
Following the scent he found a clearing with what he recognized to be an entire Noxian scouting party dead on the grass. With only a single girl standing before the corpses.
She was a pretty thing: black hair, gold eyes. Her alabaster tails reflected the moonlight. She was young still, perhaps the same age as his apprentice was, but certainly quite alluring regardless.
He looked at her, his changed eyes glowing crimson in the shadows of the wood.
"Did you kill these men?"
She had been distracted by one of the fresher corpses, or at least it looked like it. She started and looked in his direction.
"Come out and come to me." He heard her say. He sensed the power in her words and the intent behind them. He laughed and stepped into the clearing and approached her slowly, standing to his full height and towering over her petite form. She was quick to realize that she was not in control of the situation and upon seeing the monster that had come out of the shadow, moved to run away.
He grabbed her arm before she had the chance.
She fought back, hurling a strange glowing orb at him that he dodged the first time but failed to do so as it came back. He growled as he felt his soul flay just a bit at contact, but did not let her go.
"You're sloppy, girl." He told her after holding on to her as she continued her struggle. His words causing her to pause. "You hunt like an animal, but don't know how to hunt men - not without getting caught."
Her brows furrowed at his words. She opened her mouth to respond but he cut her off.
"You're parlor trick with mind magic is cute and definitely useful, but it won't work on those that know how to get around it - know how to use it against you." He pulled her close to him as he said his last words, his face inches from hers as he laced his own words with intent.
The effect was immediate and she shivered and fell to her knees, her eyes wide as she stared at him. The fear was plain on her face, and he relished it.
"What is your name, girl?"
He was an alchemist by trade, had at one point been called the professor by those that admired his work, he was a beast by nature for his heart and spirit were those of a predator.
His apprentice in alchemy had failed him, not grasping the nature of intent and the need for a greater cause, but perhaps as a beast he would find one that would learn from him.
The girl was still on her knees and shivering. Having let go of her arm, she wrapped them around herself as her gold eyes stared up at his glowing red.
"I… I-I am Ahri."
Yes. He might have found one worthy of his work.